The UFO Truth Magazine Conference 2014 By Ben Emlyn-Jones
authority on the subject in the country and has earned an international repu‐ tation for her research. She's a personal friend and colleague of Gary He‐ seltine and writes for the magazine. She and Gary had a sighting at a lake near Bergen in Norway. In 1952 Denmark took part in Operation Mainbrace, a massive international naval exercise involving over two hundred ships. It was a vast muscle‐display for the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War. UFO’s have always taken an interest in human military affairs, for reasons only known to themselves, and Mainbrace was the scene of a UFO flap that covered the entire area of the exercise, from Greenland to the British Isles. Many objects were seen by Danish ships and an officer on one of them be‐ came a principle witness. Another Dane who has spoken out about his UFO experiences is the policeman Evald Maarup. In 1970 in Hadersley, Denmark he encountered a strange object in the sky and took a photograph of it. This was the first of many encounters he was to have over three years. He de‐ scribes the object as being ten metres in diameter and with a hole at the bottom from which shone a beam of light. His fellow police officers laughed at him and suggested he see a psychiatrist. Pia has had experience with all the various UFO organizations in Denmark and when she described them I was surprised how similar they sounded to the various organizations we see in the UK. She works directly for Copenhagen UFO Research and Exopolitics Denmark, but there is also an outfit called SUFOI‐ Skandinavisk (Scandinavian) UFO Information, see: http://www.sufoi.dk Pia is highly suspicious of this group because although it formally declares that it still takes the extraterrestrial hypothesis seriously and pays the odd bit of lip‐service to those who genuinely do all the time, it is in practice mostly a pack of Skeptic debunkers. So CUFOR and Exopolitics Denmark appear to be the equivalent of Exopolitics Great Britain and Gary’s PRUFOS Police Data‐ base, SUFOI sounds to me very similar in form to BUFORA, see here for my review of their 2012 conference: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/bufora‐conference‐2012.html Interestingly the year before, BUFORA cancelled a lecture by Richard D Hall at their 2011 conference. Nevertheless UFO research in Denmark is going full speed ahead, there’s a conference there this year on crop circles with the Norwegian film maker Terje Toftenes. I wish Pia all the best with it. Roberto Pinotti http://www.newsufo.com/progettoblog The next of the conference’s foreign speakers came all the way from Italy. Roberto Pinotti has been studying UFO’s since long before most of the conference’s delegates were born. He can speak good English, but he has a strong accent and I had to concentrate hard to understand him, and I’m glad I did. He helped organize a very successful UFO con‐ ference in 2010 in San Marino, as I read in Flying Saucer Review. He has travelled the world working alongside J Allen Hynek and John Mack. In Roswell he interviewed the witnesses Lt. Walter Haut and Glenn Dennis; he also knew the late Col. Philip Corso, a well‐known spokesman on the sub‐ ject. I’ve read Corso’s book and don’t quite know what to make of his story. Al‐ though he is highly thought of in most of the UFO community, also he is a former intelligence officer and Pentagon official therefore a high caliber wit‐ ness, I can’t help finding some of his testimony dubious, see: Page 29 Phenomena Magazine: August 2014 - Issue 64: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk
http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/day‐after‐roswell‐by‐col‐philip‐j‐ corso.html Roberto told us that he “infiltrated” the scientific community, no mean feat that. He concentrated on SETI‐the Search for Extra‐Terrestrial Intelligence. This is a project intended to detect radio signals from intelligent beings out in the deep cosmos; it was passionately endorsed by Carl Sagan and he wrote a novel about it which was turned into a film‐ Contact. Roberto tried to ar‐ range an affiliation between SETI and UFO groups, which seems bizarre. SETI proponents are totally Skeptical of UFO’s for obvious reasons; it makes their efforts somewhat superfluous. Roberto also defied Cold War allegiance by forging links with UFOlogists in the Soviet Union; that area has the richest and most promising UFO data in the world. There was the Tunguska event of 1908 and the famous sighting in Voronezh in 1989. Roberto’s journal No‐ tiziaro UFO published articles that were also put out in the famous Russian broadsheet, Pravda. Roberto also spoke about a wave of UFO sightings in 1954; these included the incredible close encounter over Florence at the packed football ground‐ Stadio Artemio Franchi in which a group of objects flew low over a Fiorentina match, see here for more details: http://hpanwo‐voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/football‐ufo‐in‐florence.html UFOlogy in Italy has a long history, in fact the dictator Benito Mussolini was obsessed by the subject and ordered an official government investigation in 1933, a full fourteen years before Project Sign. Il Duce’s interest was sparked off by a wave of sightings of black triangles, a form of UFO still widely re‐ ported today. Another case in Italy I’m interested in is the creature encoun‐ tered by Filiberto Caponi; Timothy Good investigated this personally in his book Unearthly Disclosures. See here for more detail: http://www.filibertocaponi.it/index.php?lang=it I asked Roberto about it and he laughed. “That one is nothing to do with UFO’s he said. It’s cryptozoology!” Technically he is correct. There’s nothing connecting the being Caponi claims to have encountered with ET, but the features of the entity do resemble those reported by witnesses of beings which do come from close encounters of the third kind, so is Roberto being a bit hasty? It was good to meet Roberto and his wife; it was a very interesting lecture. Capt. Robert Salas http://www.citizenhearing.org/witnesses_robert_s.html Stephen Hawking once commented on UFO’s; through his electronic voice box he declared that, seeing as they only appear to “cranks and weirdoes” he was very sceptical of their existence. However this next witness is a member of a profession who, by its very na‐ ture, has had his psychiatric health more care‐ fully monitored and screened than anybody else in the world. The job Capt. Robert Salas USAF, ret. used to do was man the launch control station for intercontinental nuclear missiles. In the event of all out nuclear war it was his finger that was “on the button”, and he who would send the missiles on their way. If at any time he launched his missiles without authorization, because he lost his mind, or by mistake, then the country targeted would most likely shoot back before asking questions and this could result in an all‐out exchange which would destroy the world forever. Who would let a “crank” or “weirdo” do a job like that? Yet Capt. Salas did have an encounter with a UFO and he is speaking openly about it today. It was one morning in 1967 and he was on duty in the launch facility. This is in an underground bunker, or “capsule”, in a rural area of Montana USA, a long way from his headquarters at Malmstrom Air Force Base; nuclear